Backup and restore

Backup and restore

Overview

Explains what the feature is or what its benefits are to the user or customer.

Feature

ThoughtSpot provides a full set of backup and restore features to protect your data from disasters and
human error. You can use these for disaster recovery, for migrating a cluster, or for recreating
a cluster on another appliance or virtual appliance.

There are two ways to save a cluster. Snapshots run faster and are taken on a running
cluster, but in some cases you'll need to pull a snapshot out as a backup.

Snapshots

A snapshot is a point-in-time capture of a cluster persisted on
disk in HDFS. You can take a snapshot at any time, and it takes about 20 seconds.

Snapshots
are both taken on and restored to a cluster while it is running. A snapshot may only be
restored to the same cluster on which it was taken. In addition, the cluster software
release version must match the snapshot release version.

If you need to move data
between clusters or restore to a cluster that has been updated to a new release, contact ThoughtSpot Support.

Backups

A backup is similar to a snapshot, except that it is
self-contained and portable, because it is stored on disk in the file system. A backup is
created by pulling an existing snapshot out as a backup. It is recommended to pull a backup
periodically, to protect you from losing data and any work that has been done by users. You
can set up ThoughtSpot to take these backups periodically at intervals and modes you define.

Disaster recovery

There is an even more robust strategy for backup and recovery that involves having a backup
cluster offline that is kept in sync with the production cluster. Then if the production
cluster fails, the backup cluster can be drafted to take its place with minimal loss of work
and disruption to operations. Details on this architecture and instructions on setting it up
are available in the ThoughtSpot Disaster Recovery
Guide,
which you can request from ThoughtSpot.

About backups
You can use a backup to restore a cluster to a prior state, a differently configured appliance, or move it to from an appliance to a virtual cluster or vice versa. Some advanced administrative operations also use backups.

About restore operations
When restoring to a running cluster that has not been updated, you'll usually use a snapshot. But in the case where you've updated the cluster to a new release, the configuration has been changed significantly, or you're restoring to a different cluster, you'll need to restore from a backup.